No Room at the Inn
Published 18 years, 11 months pastBoy, Dave wasn’t kidding: available hotel rooms for SXSW are mighty few and far between. I ended up at the Radisson, just like Dave and a few other people I know, and that was only by calling the Radisson directly instead of going through the SXSW housing desk, which doesn’t have any more rooms available there. The direct booking was more expensive than the SXSW rate, but at least I’m on the north side of the river—oh, excuse me, the lake. Plus I got a king suite for only a few dollars more than the conference rate for a single room in the Hilton, and there’s free wifi in the lobby.
I called a number of other hotels directly, and most of them were booked up solid. Apparently, there’s a very large writers’ conference ending the day before SXSWi begins, and that’s thrown extra monkey wrenches into the gears.
So if you still haven’t booked your room, don’t wait any longer, and try calling places directly even if the SXSW site shows them as sold out. Otherwise, you’ll be a mile or more away, pay through the nose, or both. I’d have booked sooner, except I wasn’t even certain that I’d be going until a couple of weeks ago, and in the chaos of prepping for AEA and our annual holiday party, I didn’t get to booking until today. Hopefully, you’ve avoided my mistake, but if not, don’t compound it.
So… anyone else staying at the Radisson? We could all geek out in the lobby some night.
Comments (13)
Yeah, I’m glad I didn’t wait. I look forward to seeing you there.
I’m coming, staying at the hampton. Nonetheless, I’ll walk the couple blocks over to your lobby to geek out w/ you guys.
It’s times like these that I’m glad I have a good friend in grad school at U Texas…
Yup, a friend of mine and I are both staying at the Radisson: I had thought we’d drawn the short straw not managing to get rooms at the Hampton, but with yourself and Mr Shea both staying there I’m not so sure :-D
I’m so glad FatBusinessman and I booked our hotel when we did. It was only because I noticed that the Hampton Inn Downtown was sold out (even direct sales) back in early October that we got around to booking that soon.
Still, it’s nice to know that we won’t be the only geeks in the Radisson!
I’m glad I booked early! I’ll be at the Hampton, but I may drop in the lobby of the Radisson if you’ll be hanging there.
Well, I won’t be at the SXSW, I look forward to hearing about it soon!
“We could all geek out in the lobby some night.”
Totally in.
Another Radisson booking here. The walk isn’t too bad – I passed it on my way across the lake to the Hyatt last year (I did the Hotwire thing). Definitely up for lobby geeking, bummer re the room wifi $$.
Crap, I think my last wisps of hope for attending are dying a screaming death, even though *cough* *choke* I live closer to Austin than any of the other WaSP folks excepting Meryl Evans.
Wow, reminds me of a trip to Virgninia beacha couple years back, I had a friend down there and he mentioned there were something in the neighborhood of 200 hotels.. come on down.. etc etc… Well some kind of convention had hit that week, and it took 4 hours to find a hotel with a room (after going from one to the next to the next..)
Of course tht hotel only had a room for one day, so me and my three collegues had to unload everything, shower, etc, and then reload everything the next and start going thotel to hotel again the next day… we had to do that every dor for 7 days.. huge waste of time… at least you found one with wi fi and enough room for the whole stay!
I hope there is still something available when I’m permitted to book, which will probably be the middle of next week! I stayed at the Hilton last year, so we’ll see what happens!
I’ll be at the Radisson as well. Free wifi in their lobby will make it easier for impromptu geeking out than paid wifi in the Hilton lobby. That and the TGIFridays. See you and Dave at the Radisson. Maybe a perfect opportunity to hack up a CSS Microformat Zen Garden?